


cross the bridge as it burns

by arbitrarily



Category: Babylon Berlin (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Everything, Drug Use, F/M, Hypnotism, Non-Linear Narrative, Post-Season/Series 02, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2018-12-18
Packaged: 2019-08-23 15:02:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,060
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16621241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: Don't try to put your thoughts in order.Gereon at the end of the world.





	cross the bridge as it burns

**Author's Note:**

  * For [studybears](https://archiveofourown.org/users/studybears/gifts).



> Happy Holidays! I had so much fun working with your letter and your prompts and diving headlong into this fandom and these characters. I hope you have a fantastic holiday and a very Happy New Year!

 

 

 

 

_“Close your eyes. We shall do this again. You are tired, you’re very tired.”_

 

 

 

First he takes his ghosts and he puts them in a box. Each ghost has a name but they do not pass his lips.

The future they had told him—boys, soldiers, barely men—was to be golden. He is not meant to think on this. He wakes each morning, rises unwillingly, and now he slots the needle in his arm. He rests, and then he moves again. He moves deliberately, as if steadied, braced, to be knocked down. He heads to work—holster, badge, gun. He loses himself in the crowd—train, trolley, Alexanderplatz—and he emerges at the station.

The world has remade itself since Gereon’s arrival in Berlin. He is the same; it's the city that's altered. Broken things do not change, not until they are fixed.

The truth tells a different story, and that story is that he has changed, too. It’s visible in him, in the tired way he carries himself, as if each limb has been shattered and ill-tended, left jagged under his skin. It is there in the violent, violet stain of the circles bruised beneath his eyes. His skin is too thin—he feels that too, most days.

He does not know how anyone else could wear this world. This city.

And then there is Charlotte.

 

 

 

_“You will count back from ten. Do not hurry. You are not alone_.”

 

 

 

The case is simple, open and shut. You'd never know it from Charlotte's flushed cheeks and bright eyes.

Gereon had arrived at the scene to find Charlotte already there, her small notebook opened and primed for clues. The small kitchen smells of burnt animal fat. A skillet still smokes on the stove, the wall behind it scorched. The man’s body is still on the floor, beside the upturned kitchen table. 

“The wife?” Gereon asks Charlotte in lieu of hello.

She grins, cocks her head towards the other room. The wife's arms are braced behind her back, hands most likely cuffed. The lead detective frowns down at her, the both of them silent. Gereon doesn't recognize him. “Confessed,” she says. 

It is her first case as assistant detective. 

When he steps closer to her, he realizes it’s not a notebook she has open in her hand, but her badge. It gleams appealingly. He reaches forward, runs his finger down the cool edge of it. 

“I thought I’d be prepared. Should anyone question my presence here.”

“And did they?” His fingers are still upon her badge. He looks up at her face. Her grin deepens, front teeth biting into her bottom lip. A girl looking for a fight.

_The little cheeky one_ , Bruno had called her. Best not to think of Bruno. He will put him in a box. He steps back from her.

“I’ll meet you back at the morgue?” Charlotte says. She turns her attention back to the body.

 

 

 

_“Ten. Nine. Steady now.”_

 

 

 

He finds her in the bathroom. The men’s, again, Red Castle, police headquarters, the stalls unoccupied. Charlotte is at the sink and she looks to him when the door opens, when he enters. There's nothing in her face to mark surprise. The better part of three months has passed, Charlotte as assistant detective; she works under a detective who isn't him. She has a file balanced against the stained porcelain sink. He lets himself imagine she was waiting for him. 

Gereon lifts his eyes to hers and then he pushes past her into a stall. “We have to stop meeting like this,” he says, each word a taut _rat-a-tat_. An offense. His hands shake, tremble, beyond his control. He can barely bolt the stall. 

His hands shake more as he pulls out his kit. In anticipation, desperation. This new method, the needle, is harder to manage than the slim vials, though the results are better. He could cry with it. He leans into the fresh flush of relief, heavy in his veins. He sags against the side of the stall, cool against his cheek. On the other side of the door, Charlotte is saying something. 

He breathes, heavy and deep. Time skips, buckles. He breathes in again; the exhale stutters out of him. She says something again. Gereon rolls his shirt sleeve back down. His hands no longer tremble but they no longer feel his own.

Charlotte stands too close to him as he washes his hands at the sink. Her hip brushes his hip. She is watching him now, that careful look of hers she gets, determined, soft despite all that steely resolve. She is not speaking now. 

When he moves to leave, she steps directly in front of him. Deliberate, like a step out of a choreographed dance he never learned. She holds her hand up in front of his face, so he stares into the flat of her palm. There is pen smudged there. He wants to run his tongue down the lined indents, taste skin, sweat, ink. He wants to rest.

Neither moves. There is an unspoken understanding between them that he will wait her out. Wait to see what she does. Finally, she says, “Close your eyes,” so he does that, too. He can smell her, even over the disinfectant and mildew stink of the bathroom. There’s warmth to her, always, in all ways. He’s drawn to it. He’s drawn to her. She comes closer to him, he can feel that, even with his eyes shut. As directed. He made for a good soldier except for when it counted. He can hear the smile in her voice when she finally speaks again.

She opens her mouth. Her mouth. His eyes are closed but he can see it. Pink tongue, pink lips, he wants to touch it. She opens her mouth, and she says —

 

 

 

_“Breathe. Inhale, exhale. Eight.”_

 

 

 

“When you move you take a part of me with you.” Gereon looks up at Charlotte in alarm. He feels this way, sometimes. As if he has missed a vital step, a beat. The man suspended on the stairs, just before he falls. Charlotte grins as she exhales a cloud of smoke, her cigarette holder held aloft like a gleaming scepter. He had found her here, by accident as much by design. “A gentleman told that to me once. We were dancing, this very club, and he grabbed me about the waist, and that was what he said to me. I laughed, seeing as I had only just met him.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

She shrugs. She’d be a wonderful study. Photograph her every reaction and give him the time he both wants and needs to pore over her. Learn her the same way smarter men learn maps and battle tactics, survival skills. 

“I think of it sometimes, but I never say it out loud.”

“You’ve said it now.” His hands twitch.

“Yes. I have. It’s no less strange a thing to say, is it.”

Gereon says nothing to that. His fingers twitch again, against the glass in his hand. The glass is empty. He doesn’t remember drinking it. 

“There’s a lot I don’t say out loud,” Charlotte is saying. The expression on her face is both coy and something he wants to call afraid. Hesitant. He wants to say that is unlike her. “In my head, I say plenty. In my head you and I have had so many private conversations that sometimes I forget what I've actually told you and what I only meant to. What I wished to tell you.” 

Warmth floods within him. “For example?” he says. 

She cocks her head. “When I was gone? Before," she waves her hand in a loose circle, "everything? I was abducted. They took me. For days. Did I ever tell you about that time?” The warmth is gone, replaced inside him by a mounting panic. He wishes she would reach across the table and hold his hands steady. 

“What?” She is watching him the way he wishes he could watch her at all times. “What?” he says again. 

“It’s a small story,” she says. “I like to pretend I’ve already told it to you.”

 

 

 

_“A figure approaches. Seven. Ever closer now, they come. Do not hurry.”_

 

 

 

“It was Moka Efti, of all places. The kitchen, the freezer. Dead fish, and me.” She speaks low, breathlessly. “I had no idea a person could be so cold. Of course I’ve been cold before, but this was a cold that seeped through me, down to the bone. Made me think, this is where I die. With the dead fish. And they’d ask me things and they thought I knew more than I did, but that’s hardly a first. Have you noticed men always accuse a woman of being either too stupid or too smart? It’s never just right, is it. But that has nothing to do with this, though I suppose it has entirely to do with this, but eventually they let me go, and then there you were and I don’t know if you had been looking for me or not, but it didn’t really matter, did it, because I had been found and I was free.”

Her body is pressed to his and her voice is soft but strong, breathy. Warm. They are in his bed, and this is later, Berlin different still, they are different (he has changed)—for a time, even, they are one, in the flesh, a declarative as biblical and true as anything he has ever known. Her body is restless beside his, even sated, and this is a fact he knows now. She does not need much sleep. She’ll let him rest, watch him as the drug takes him down and out and under, and she will not say a word. She will brush the hair back from his face and hold his jaw should he start to shake and her hands will pass over his body as faint and impersonal as the beat of wings. As his body stops, hers keeps going. When he wakes, when he surfaces, he will ask her what she’s done in his absence. Her answers always read as lies: she read the paper. She read his case files. She solved one, she solved all of them. She took up knitting. “I’ve been very busy,” is a thing she’ll say, and then it will twist: “I want you very badly,” and that is a thing Gereon will have no need to question. Her eagerness—teeth, tongue, hands, cunt—void any doubt. But this is a long way from the present, and in the present, which is also the future, Gereon says, “I should have been there.”

A puff of laughter pushes from her. “You,” she says, and she draws a clean line down the center of his naked chest, dissecting him. “You would’ve only made things harder.” 

She says it with a grin, and that, he supposes is one way to say yes. You should have been there. Where were you? Where do you go? She never asks. When you close your eyes, where do you go?

 

 

 

 _“Six._ _You should be here. Your body is heavy, but it is yours.”_  

 

 

 

When Gereon tries to focus, sometimes, he slips away. The problem is cruelly opposite from forgetting. He remembers everything. Anno’s wedding to Helga. Each letter Helga writes and each she sends to him, each promise of a love requited. Anno in the field, the stench of death and shit and gasping chemical horror, Anno’s face, always, Anno’s face. The acrid stink of the red darkroom, the lewd images he’s meant to erase. The spill of gin and human sweat that shines in the glaring red light at the club with the Americans, the blues singer. He howls with Bruno over the coiled film reel as it burns. Dried cement caked to his trousers his shoes his hands his face. Her mouth tips up to his and he can almost taste the sour lemonade, the acid bite of alcohol. Charlotte’s limbs move too fast but he keeps pace. Charlotte crouches before him, Charlotte’s body cold and wet and unmoving. Charlotte lifts her fingers to her mouth, a turned key in the lock. He can hear her voice. She says —

 

 

 

_“Continue. It is not far. Five. Inhale. Four. Exhale.”_

 

 

 

She is dancing. This is how he finds her. 

There is no real difference to be found between the Charlotte at the station and the Charlotte before him now—demanding and brash, self-assured and brave. 

He spots Charlotte in the crowd. He watches her, as if he can make the distance between them grow and shrink at will.

Finally, he goes to her. The crowd jostles and parts around him. It’s easy to insinuate himself opposite her and dance. Match her beat for beat. Her mouth is all teeth as she drapes an arm around his shoulders. Her knees knock his and she laughs, her head tipped back. There is sweat collected at the base of her throat; he wants to hold her still and taste it. 

It’s easy to want her. To let his fingers glance over her arm, bare and warm beneath his hand, before he finds her waist. She steps into his grip, her body still manic and outside his control as it moves around and against him. He holds tight.

 

 

 

 _“Three.”_  

 

 

 

Gereon’s bed is empty now. He had pushed Helga away, after. After—his brother, his face, _breathe in and breathe out_. It doesn’t stop, of course. It never stops. Any progress made with his brother’s suggestive therapy, with the drugs, is shattered now. That was a thing he now knew could happen: you could lift yourself up like the thinnest pane of glass and you could let it fall. Break. 

He lives in a new boardinghouse now. The water is never warm and the wallpaper peels in the corners of his bedroom. The brass bed frame whines and rattles under him each time he shifts his weight. The window opens on an alleyway, the stench of damp street and cabbage and all the filth this city collects and brings. He does not open his window. He curls onto his side and the bed shivers, clanks, beneath him.

He closes his eyes; he tries to picture Helga. Her arms are skinnier under his hands than he remembers—imagined arms and imagined hands—and her body leaner. A bright, full mouth, and as his own presses against hers—imagined, always that—he recognizes her for who she is and isn’t. He puts her in a box. He keeps his eyes closed. He conjures new ghosts.

 

 

 

_“Two_.”

 

 

 

Her mouth is hot on his. 

Berlin at night, a stretch of wet and empty street. Old adverts and government-issued flyers peel back from damp brick. There is the rattle of a train car in the distance, coming closer. “I’ll walk you home,” he had said, and now this. He kissed her, he knows that much. As they had walked, their fingers had first brushed and then tangled. He felt that tremble deep within him. He walked closer to her, crowded her—she invited it. And then he kissed her. 

Gereon can’t help but compare this to his imagination, to his remembered reality: the cold water and her cold flesh. The wild flare of desperation that belonged to a battlefield, to France, to somewhere muddy and lost, a place that will never leave him be. It’s nothing like that now. There’s no room for thought, only her mouth. Hot, wet, open, his. She kisses as she does all things: eagerly, hungrily, without regard for any potential consequences. He kisses her back in kind, lets her feel each tremor and shake of his body into hers. His hand steadies only as it clutches at her throat, his fingers catching in the hair at the nape of her neck. He leans bodily into her and she stumbles under his weight. 

“You’re very tired,” she says against his mouth. He pulls back slightly from her, rests his forehead to hers.

“Yes,” he says. He has been for some time. Her thumb passes over the bottom swell of his lips. Her skin tastes warm, fleeting. He thinks of what she had said earlier that night, that she speaks to him when he’s not there. 

“I think of you all the time,” he says. There: a truth. Immutable, unchangeable. When you move you take a part of me with you. 

“Oh,” she says. It sounds a lot like relief, pleased and reassured. 

Charlotte draws her hand down over his face, as if she can shield him from not only anything he might see now but everything he already has. He presses his own hand over hers. 

“You’re very tired,” she says again, her voice lower. Gentle. “You’re very tired.”

 

 

 

“ _One. Open your eyes.”_

 

 

 

Charlotte eats quickly. Gereon is seated across from him. His coffee has gone cold, his cigarette smolders forgotten at hand. He inhales, exhales. Inhales, exhales. Charlotte watches him while she eats, her mouth open, nothing delicate to be found in her. He likes her all the more for it. Her badge is new, shined, and always with her. It sits on the table now, at her elbow. 

“Do you think you’ll return?” she asks. Her mouth is full. She swallows. “To Cologne?” The question comes from nowhere. Catches him like a bear trap, all mean teeth and spilled blood. 

He stamps out his cigarette, slowly. Gereon doesn’t know to tell her: I can’t imagine that. He has a hard time picturing a future for himself. When he tries, he can see a tunnel, sometimes. When he pictures a tunnel, it ends in dark. It slips away. He knows he will lose himself in it. He knows he can only see the terrible then, the impossible. That’s not a future, but the past, circled back around. 

Sometimes he sees her. It takes no effort on his part; she is simply there. 

He sees her now. She brushes a loose strand of hair off her face. She wipes her fingers on a napkin and leaves it crumpled on the table alongside her plate. She reaches across the table and takes one of his cigarettes. He leans forward to light it. 

“No,” he says. She inhales, exhales. “I think I’ll stay.”

 

 

 


End file.
